


The Queen in Yellow

by orphan_account



Category: Millennium Trilogy - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 18:30:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Skogsrå could steal the lives of good men with a kiss, but Lisbeth didn’t come with a tail belted underneath her clothes to explain how she got her maw around good people and made them bad. There was no Christian church wedding to purify the Midas rot from her soul.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Queen in Yellow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sophiaiswisdom](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophiaiswisdom/gifts).



Lisbeth opens her front door wide and Mikael walks through it.

She feels the earth quake with the actuality of it, in a place that’s beyond her apartment, beyond her fingers scrabbling at the nothing between her hands and her thighs and Mikael’s assuaged smile. It is such a small, mindless gesture that it seems too surreal, now, with all that has passed them serving as the backdrop.

She can’t help but entertain the awry thought that this Mikael in her doorway is a ghost of the head, a strange hope manifest. She finds it hard to look at his face, in case he isn’t real - or worse, in case he _is_.

Perhaps she has drowned in the bath. And wouldn’t that be apt? A whisper-quiet end to the screaming warfare. Going to sleep at the end of a long day, the transition so liquid easy that she hasn’t a hope to notice she won’t actually be waking back up.

 

The next time he comes, though, Lisbeth knows much better. He brings food, cupped coffee and baked goods as token civilities bequeathed to the altar of her kitchen table, head dipped just low enough to seem like it’s done in prayer. He touches his socked toes to the hair on her bare legs while they talk, voices stutter-stalling soft, his shoes kicked off under the table. She gets chipped pastry stuck in her teeth, dribbles cream and jam down her chin when she forgets to close her mouth.

It's as if he plans to stay for a while, and sure that Lisbeth will allow him.

Lisbeth is insane. Zalachenko put it into her head and Teleborian put it onto papers and somewhere in the midst of the violations it became its own self-fulfilling prophecy. They bent her back far enough to bring her full circle and left her with little else to do but to dig their graves out with her filed down nails and blunted teeth. She filled the holes to bursting, put the bodies of everyone who had so much as wronged her once face down in the ground and let their bones crack under the weight of their dirt.

She finished what all of them started, and yet, in the end, it never even stopped them all from just climbing back out. Now they walk around where she can see them but can’t catch them, in seas of other bodies and in the dark. When she sleeps. When she’s awake. There are always more Zalachenkos and Teleborians and Bjurmans to take their places. The world has monsters in excess.

So she’s insane. It was the inevitability she was handed from the start. It’s her serrated condemnation, sometimes her only armour or weapon. It’s served her well. It’s served her enough.

Mikael, though. Mikael makes Lisbeth _mad_ \-- a different kind of insane altogether.

Lisbeth is a closed door that Mikael doesn’t try to walk through. He’s looped his fingers through the gap between splintering wood and old carpet and waited to see what she will permit to happen. There is a dearth of inadequacy in language when it comes to translating Lisbeth’s feelings about that into words, about him. Love is both a good and a lacking approximation.

Perhaps hate is a closer one. She’s never been entirely convinced either way.

Mikael’s foot judders up her shin, catching on her knee, and she tips her head up from her thoughts. “There you are,” he remarks, gentle.

She catches his sock and drags his foot higher, pinning it against the inside of her thigh. “We should fuck.” It’s sudden on her tongue, heavy in her mouth. Like provocation.

Lisbeth doesn’t play well with others, won’t play with Berger - she’s not going to _share_.

Time clicks over. His smile shies, even as she feels his toes curl. It’s all stupid, really. “Yes. Okay,” he says, and she drops his foot to stand.

Lisbeth doesn’t need to see to know where to head, so she walks with her eyes closed, her shirt pulled up underneath her armpits. She can feel Mikael behind her, close without touching. He’s louder when she’s blinded. She wants him to grab her. She wants to engulf him whole.

He does touch her, eventually, finally, when they’re in the bedroom’s doorway, when her shirt finally comes off over her head. His hands smooth down her ribs, fingers roughing the skin where they settle on her hips, and she can feel him lean down to kiss the laurel of her hair. The backs of his knuckles sand against her forearms.

It would be nice to kiss him now, she thinks. She would have to turn around, have to rock up on her toes to seal the gap, if she moved too suddenly for him to dip into it, but-- it would be nice. “Strip,” is what she asks for instead.

His hands tighten around her sides in a twitch. The sudden hitch in his breathing unseats a clump of her hair against her scalp, and it itches. It’s an age of impatience before he lets go and she can hear his clothes crackle, the frequency all off, too sharp. Like gunshots in a hollow warehouse. Like panic.

Mikael doesn’t take long enough to undress, doesn’t take long enough for her to finish thinking, mind branching off in a thousand new directions, expanding with possibilities. The urge to kiss him returns with the return of his hands as he threads their fingers together, knotting them against her navel, lips to her temple. She cranes her neck to align their mouths.

Mikael is a good man - one of the better ones. Skogsrå could steal the lives of good men with a kiss, but Lisbeth didn’t come with a tail belted underneath her clothes to explain how she got her maw around good people and made them bad. There was no Christian church wedding to purify the Midas rot from her soul.

Her track record with good people wasn’t a point of pride, wasn’t a gleaming character reference - it was a tally of casualties. Sooner or later, she’d take Mikael’s name for it, too, even despite their feelings for eachother not being in alignment.

“Lisbeth.” His breath is warm on her teeth. She slicks her tongue on the edge of his top lip. “Lisbeth.” He thumbs her collarbone, the flare of her shoulders, keeps repeating himself until she stops trying to crawl into his mouth.

“Get on the bed,” she says. She doesn’t quite meet his eyes.

Lisbeth can feel his prick twitch against her backside, the line of him hard, hot. He is so so slow to untangle them that Lisbeth has half a mind to change their course by the time he draws away, palms itching with a need to grab him back. She waits until he’s settled, propped on his elbows in the sliding sheets, legs switching between closed and open, oddly coltish. He’s acting almost virginal, and still Lisbeth feels faintly like she’s the most naked of the both of them. It’s a horrible feeling.

She touches his stomach, first, nails catching in the hair there, the muscle clenching, quivering. Mikael sucks in a breath and she straddles him, below the curved knife of his ribs, hands steadying her weight astride his neck. She feels her head contract, possibilities narrowing down, ideas forming within attainable scopes.

She strokes the tendons in his neck to feel the pitter-patter of his pulse ignite, slides her hand up just enough to thumb the bow of his bottom lip, watches as he draws the digit into his mouth. His breath shudders around her skin and he sighs in the back of his throat, eyes fluttering for but a moment when she bends in closer.

Lisbeth twists her other hand in Mikael’s hair, pulling his neck into a taut arch above the pillows, and knows what she wants. Her legs are damp when she shifts, the sweat pooled in the backs of her knees dislodging down Mikael’s nails when he slots his fingers into the nooks, helps her to straddle over his face. It’s a delayed moment before she finds her footing, the brush of Mikael’s nose along the folds of her cunt enough to throw her centre of gravity off-kilter, make her scratch at the wall and falter.

His laugh is a breathless one, made short by the tug of Lisbeth’s fingers, hard enough to strike a match-hot burn in his scalp, as she guides him up. Her thighs clench around his jaw at the first lave of his tongue, and then he’s tilting her hips back with his palms, tipping his chin up to suck her clit in between his teeth.

 

After, when he’s wiped her from his mouth with the back of his hand and she’s finally, finally let him come, mouth hot on the cut of his hipbone as her fingers clench around him, she lets herself be pressed back into the bed by his palms and his monosyllabic nonsense sounds. He sighs against her nape, chest snugged up against her back, and she crosses their ankles absently as the mattress sags into a basin to catch their weight.

It’s still afternoon - he will surely have to leave soon, and there are things she could be doing. It’s almost enough to make her pry their sweat-slick skin apart, put the distance of rooms and preoccupations between them, but then he smiles in her hair and thumbs her bellybutton and it unravels some of the uneasiness coiled in the base of her spine, mollifies the drive to run.

“You’re a world away,” Mikael says. It’s ambiguous sentimentality, perhaps, but Lisbeth supposes he is at least half right. She can feel her mind stretching beyond the tableau on her bed, darting off into darkness uninhabited by this kind of warmth.

“Hmm,” she replies. She drags his hand up to furl beneath the swell of her breast and traps his fingers with her arm, just to feel his breath hitch so close to her ear, his chest staggering along her shoulderblades.

He is asleep minutes later, fucked out and guileless, and she maps out his breathing for long minutes before she can close her eyes, too.

She doesn’t sleep.

 

Lisbeth can’t shake the pervasive restlessness that Mikael’s left to take root in his shambling wake. It follows after her like an old ache, tripping her up over phantom nothings across her apartment. She doesn’t change her sheets and goes to bed with his stale smell creeping up her nostrils, clinging to her skin.

The need to move is so overcoming that she’s booked flights before the week is out, laptop balanced over her bare legs while she chain smokes on the window shelf seat overlooking the harbour, flicking her ash onto the floor.

It doesn’t matter where she goes. Most of it is all the same, in the end. People. Weather. The space and distance necessary to inhale.

She doesn’t write a note, but the new jar of coffee she busies her hands with by putting it in her cupboard before she leaves isn’t an afterthought, either. It's rich. Exotic. Pungent smell, one that clings.

Something nice.

 

She sleeps a lot in Ukraine, sleeps almost right, wearies herself enough from studying _boyovyi hopak_ and walking the streets around the school and the nearby city and her accommodation until the soles of her boots are ragged and she hits the sheets half dead. She stops being so aware of time and how it ticks past. She does not answer Mikael’s sole email, which is short but nevertheless deep in both its curiosity and its concern.

One of the girls in her class cuts her hair on the stoop of the dormitory, their bodies huddled under the arch of the door and away from the outbursts of bustle outside. Between them, they have managed a metal bowl of water and a disposable razor for their task. Her hands are small and soft, but sure when they press themselves to Lisbeth’s neck, her temples, guiding the angle of her head.

She laughs when Lisbeth shows her the pictures of the Asgarda on her phone, reading the comments with her chin tucked against Lisbeth’s shoulder. “A silly myth,” she remarks after, leaning back to wash Lisbeth’s hair from the razor’s teeth.

“But nice,” she adds, a wistful smile to her voice. Lisbeth hums her agreement, and closes the browser so she can use the darkened screen as a makeshift mirror.

 

Lisbeth does a lot of things almost right in Ukraine.

 

She sleeps a lot on the plane home, legs stretched out underneath the seat in front of her, forehead pressed to the window glass. It does very little for the lassitude or the bruising around her eyes.

 

It shouldn’t surprise her to see Mikael waiting for her at the arrivals gate. She hadn’t hidden her tracks, not like she could have. She’d been gone some months, too - enough time for him to go looking, to find what he needed to see. If she hadn't wanted, somewhere deep and dark and private, to be found, he wouldn't be here, at the end of her trail of cues.

And yet-- she is surprised. Surprised enough to stall on the ramp, to try and blearily blink the sight of him out of her eyes. He’s moving when she looks at him again, close enough for her to see the nervous smile pulling at the side of his mouth.

“You’re here,” is what he says when he reaches her, before, clearly realising the stupidity of it a bit too late, his face crumples in a sharp wince. “You’ve cut your hair.” Another wince.

Lisbeth nods, sparing him from further shame at the hand of his rapidly apparent desperation, and lets him take her by the elbow to lead her out of the pathway of the remaining passengers. His fingers linger even when they stop walking, clenching unconsciously in the folds of her jacket. It takes him a minute to remember himself, and another half of that to remember his hands and take them back.

“You’re back,” he concludes. He’s so quiet Lisbeth thinks she might have missed him speak if she wasn’t watching his mouth shape around the words.

“I am.” She shrugs. She wants to smoke, but she can’t do that while Mikael has her pinned here with his clipped talk and maladroit touches. “Did you need something?”

“Oh.” Mikael scratches his neck. “I-- no. Nothing like that.”

The skin around her mouth suddenly feels quite brittle, tight when she draws her lips into a frown. The conversation has already careened so far beyond her control she feels empowered to do little more than stand by and watch the catastrophe happen. Personal business? Lisbeth hadn't-- she hadn't dared herself to think too much on him while she had been gone, had bore the brunt of scrapes and bruises and sprains just to keep her mind misdirected, had thrown herself into other dalliances to keep her head off hoping. Love was a horrible, wrecking thing. She hated it. She hated not having the power of knowing what to do, how to cope, how to temper the sear. Without knowing a breaking point to suspend over him, or a cure, Mikael was infuriatingly limitless.

“Then?” she prompts. “Your personal call couldn't wait?”

“No.” He's whip quick, tongue tripping over the short admission. He seems frustrated with himself, equilibrium shot through. Lisbeth has that effect on people. Always manages to throw them off, with her violence, her wittedness, the mere space it takes for her body to inhabit.

He swallows, the work of his throat harsh, and tucks his hands into the pockets of his jeans. It's a tight fit, he has to squirm, square his shoulders. Lisbeth tracks his movements out of comfortable instinct.

“You were gone,” he rephrases. “I wasn't so sure you'd be back.”

“You would have seen that my tickets were return ones.” It's not an answer, or assurance – Lisbeth is pushing at the line, pushing at him. Waiting. Always waiting for weakness.

“Right,” Mikael says. “Right.” The responding deflation of his gusto is visible. He takes another steadying breath, swallows again. “I'm.”

“...Sorry?” Lisbeth tries, when the pause has dragged out past a tolerable point.

“Stupid,” he corrects, smile sheepish. “But sorry, too.”

“You're not stupid,” Lisbeth says, and feels somewhat stupid herself for it.

“I am,” Mikael insists. He reaches out, holds his hand towards her for long seconds before he touches her shoulder, as if to see if she'll burn him. His thumb curls past her collar and grazes her skin, over her tattoo. “I have been.”

His thumb rolls against her neck, a half-realised rotation, and he’s so-- _yearning_ , expression half-broken, that Lisbeth scoffs out “Are you trying to say you’re in love with me?” Mottles it with reaching disbelief, a self-preservative mockery. It’s such a far-fetched and ridiculous thing to draw from his cropped words. If she makes it a joke they can laugh. If she makes fun of it the truth won't crack her ribs wide open like a door.

“Yes,” he says, so easily, so readily that Lisbeth chokes on it, feels like she’s going to try to throw it back up, acrid and tangible. She breathes, nostrils flaring, and clamps down on Mikael’s hand when he goes to pull free.

“Be serious," she admonishes, tone grave.

She could live without him, of course. It would be a whole life, not an existence of hollow subsidy on the fringes of survival. But she was selfish, and hope had a way of making one out to be a great fool, in the end.

“I am serious.” He doesn’t try to meet her eyes at first, drawn to the way their hands connect instead, hers like a vice trap keeping him caged. When he moves it’s so, so slow, turning his hand up underneath her palm so he can slot their fingers together.

“I won’t share you." She looks down at their hands, clumsily clasped. “You would only be able to do intimate things to _me_.”

“ _With_ you, Lisbeth.” Mikael squeezes her hand. “Together.” He sounds as if he's willing the understanding onto her, the urgency reverent, touching. 

He is right: theirs has always been a partnership, however asymmetrical at times, hasn't it? Why should this part, this small part, be anything but another collaboration between two sure equals?

“ _With_ me, then,” she amends.

“Is that okay?”

“I need to get my bag,” Lisbeth says. “Yes. It’s okay.”

“Okay.” Mikael gives her hand one last perfunctory squeeze, and she lets him loose. When he reorients they are side by side, hardly a hair’s breadth of personal space between them, and his smile is wide enough that her mouth is hurting from the stretch.

Lisbeth’s head feels-- clear. Entirely in the present, entirely zeroed in on the figure Mikael cuts at her side, the noise of the airport and the pangs of hunger in her stomach, not creeping off into increasingly fragmenting directions. Just, unburdened. It's good.

“But you do have something you want me to work on,” she points out, when they're out of the terminal, and Mikael makes a face that could be called guilty.

“Yes," he says, acquiescing that truth with a pleasant lack of struggle. "But later. Dinner?”

“Of course,” Lisbeth replies. But she smiles, too.


End file.
